Hi Blue!! Let’s start with a big group hug between you, me, and anyone else reading who has braces or is going to get them!!! You signed your letter Blue in Braces, just like Chloe did when she wrote to Miss Know-It-All in Tales From a Not-So-Dorky Drama Queen. So I’m guessing you identified with Chloe, when she felt so insecure. Did you also read the part where Zoey and I gave her a huge group hug and told her how adorkable she looked?!?!?! We weren’t just saying that to make her feel better. We really thought she looked super cute—and she’s going to look extra fab when her teeth are all straight and snazzy.

I’ve gotten a number of letters about braces recently, and I think it might have something to do with that super mean letter MacKenzie wrote to Blue in Braces when she was pretending to be Miss Know-It-All (the NERVE of that girl!!!). Look, we all know MacKenzie Hollister is a rattlesnake in plumping lip gloss. But that doesn’t make her bite hurt less. If you read her super mean pro and con list about braces and caught a case of Chloe’s blues, I want you to remember a few things:

1. MacKenzie was only trying to get ME in trouble for cyberbullying when she wrote that. She wasn’t sharing her sincere feelings about braces—not that MacKenzie has a sincere bone in her entire spray-tanned body!!
2. Even if she thought those things, who cares? She’s MacKenzie, and she lives to make other people feel bad. If you let her make you feel bad, MacKenzie wins!! Do we want MacKenzie to win? NO!!!
3. Lots of people have braces, or they’ve had braces at some point in their lives. Famous people! Cute people! People you might have posters of in your room!! I give you Exhibit A: Famous People Who Have Had Braces: Beyonce, Emma Watson, Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Emma Stone, Khloe Kardashian, Niall Horan, Venus & Serena Williams, Princes Harry & William, Justin Bieber…and the list goes on and on!! Braces happen! Dorks get them! CCPs get them! The one thing they all have in common—straight teeth when it’s over!

Okay, now that we’ve established that braces themselves do not have to be so awful, lets get to the part about your crush. So he hates his little sister’s braces. Let me tell you something: this has absolutely nothing to do with how he will feel about your braces. (Quite frankly, he probably will have no feelings whatsoever about your braces, if he even notices them.)

Look, Brianna makes me KA-RAY-ZEE!!!! This is an established fact, right? So imagine Brianna got her hands on a pack of bubble gum and started smacking it all over the place, stretching it out with her fingers in front of me, and got it stuck all over the pages of my precious diary. OMG, my blood is boiling just thinking about it!!! You better believe I’d call Chloe & Zoey and say, “ARGH!!!! I HATE my little sister’s bubble gum!!!!”

But, if Brandon walked up to me the next day and held out a stick of Bubble-Wow and said, “Want a piece of gum, Nikki?” You know what I’d do? Probably blush and stammer and then say, “Thanks, Brandon!” And I’d happily pop that gum in my mouth. Because Brandon’s not my little sister. (Thank goodness!!) It’s different when it’s your crush!!

So, I feel super confident telling you that just because your crush hates his sister’s braces (probably because he has to sit through long orthodontist appointments, or she gets gross stuff stuck in them and then drinks out of his water bottle) does NOT mean he is going to have any feelings about your braces at all.

What do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Have any of you survived braces?